Pretty sure that the puppetspace, Alice-space, and hammerspace are actually all the same space. And now that you mention it, we also haven’t seen Alice since the blindness (and Tip’s loss of mojo) hit.

All your life has been a series
Of nearly destroyed
Then stitched again and back to the start…
You’ve been searching your whole life
To be more than a toy
Before your seams come falling apart…
But take heart…
He’s a Good Boy,

And if you just wait He’ll hold you and Feel —
And that’ll make you real!
He’s gonna make you real!
Just gonna make you real!

Take heart!
Take heart!
Take heart!
Take heart!

You’ll wave goodbye…
To the pain of the past,
Because there’s something lay’rs of dust can’t conceal..
Once He has made you real!
He’s gonna make you real!
Just gonna make you real!

The Velveteen Rabbit is made of velveteen – a cloth designed to imitate velvet, which itself is a cloth designed which imitates (and is named after) natural velvet: the skin that grows over and covers a deer’s antlers as they grow in size, which is covered in a distinctive soft fur.

The Skin Horse is a pull-along-horse toy, made out of some sort of skin or hide – quite possibly horsehide. Many historical toys were made out of leather. For example, most balls, and especiallybaseballs, were typically made of cowhide or horsehide. You may also be familiar with people calling playing football “throwing around the ol’ pigskin”, referencing the historical material used to make them. High quality dolls and other toys would also often share such leather construction.

That said, the phrasing is a little odd to modern earns. “Skin Horse” sounds a lot weirder to us than “Hide Horse” or “Leather Horse” would.

I didn’t know that – I’d never read the story. I always just guessed that the Skin Horse, that’d been there awhile, had been loved by the children until all his fur or velveteen or whatever had been worn down to the skin.

The Skin Horse is a servant persuaded to believe that the best outcome for a servant is to be loved by the master. (You could also make an analogy with a housewife.) The Skin Horse knows his place. (The point others made about the toys being burnt in a fire is also good.) If the project were named Formerly Velveteen Rabbit instead, then you might believe the creators’ intent was to help the subjects reach their full potential, not keep them in line.

Worth noting that in the story, the Velveteen Rabbit is happiest when it is the beloved playmate of the boy.

Moreover, none of the humans want to destroy the toys – they are forced to by circumstance, because the technology does not yet exist to offer them an alternative to burning the contaminated and now incredibly dangerous toys. They have no real alternative in the face of scarlet fever in the 20th century.

It’s then worth noting that as time passes, outside the purview of the story, technology does advance and a point is reached where toys no longer can pose a threat to the humans that own them, and stable and mutually beneficial symbiosis is attained and sustained.

Anyway, when the Velveteen Rabbit is consigned to destruction, only then does it truly consider being anything other than a toy. It actually wants to remain a toy, but circumstance has rendered that impossible. And so, purely as an alternative to destruction, it accepts becoming an actual rabbit instead.

But being an actual rabbit really isn’t much of a solution. Rabbits are prey creatures, hunted by all sorts of things. They live in fear of everything – not just humans, but in fact primarily in fear of other non-humans.

A rabbit is far, far more likely to be killed and eatten by a fellow animal than by a human. They don’t know lives of happiness or security – they know short, brutish lives of desperation, suffering, and fear. They even face threats from other rabbits – males will sometimes kill breeding rivals or their offspring, to eliminate evolutionary competition.

The Velveteen Rabbit hasn’t gained by becoming a “real” rabbit – it has in fact lost tremendously. Such a fate is only really preferable to outright death, and it isn’t what the Velveteen Rabbit ever truly wanted.

If there’s any real symbolic lesson to be taken from The Velveteen Rabbit which is applicable to the issue of the human / non-human divide, it’s that humans will treat you far better than non-humans will, and that even where there are flaws in the relationship, time and human progress will eventually rectify them.

“But being an actual rabbit really isn’t much of a solution. Rabbits are prey creatures, hunted by all sorts of things. They live in fear of everything – not just humans, but in fact primarily in fear of other non-humans.
A rabbit is far, far more likely to be killed and eatten by a fellow animal than by a human. They don’t know lives of happiness or security – they know short, brutish lives of desperation, suffering, and fear. They even face threats from other rabbits – males will sometimes kill breeding rivals or their offspring, to eliminate evolutionary competition.”

Absolutely none of which applies in Happy Shiny Children’s Story Land, in which the story takes place. Assuming the _sentient toy_ which _comes to life due to fairy magic_ is going to turn into the sort of rabbits we deal with in our reality (which is clearly not true in-story, since they can talk) is creating implications which really aren’t there.

BTW, the business about the rabbit being taught his place fails to take into account that the rabbit has no volition in this situation – he has no control over whether the Boy loves him or not, and certainly, unlike the housewife, he can’t leave to join a socialist commune or something. (The toys here seem a lot less mobile than those in, say, Toy Story).

The humans don’t choose to burn the toys. They have no choice – the toys have become a dangerous threat, for reasons outside of anyone’s control.

At the time the story takes place, scarlet fever is the leading cause of death in children. There is no real way to cure it, no disinfectants exist to sanitize contaminated objects. The only way to prevent it spreading and killing more innocent people is to burn items which may have been contaminated by it.

As for the toys only being real if someone says they are, as far as I’m aware, the humans never actually tell the Velveteen Rabbit that it isn’t real, or that it should strive to become so, or that it will only ever be real if they say so. Those are all ideas that the toys came up with themselves, and that they tell each other.

Also, even if the humans HAD been the origin of those ideas, they’d not be alone in them. The Velveteen Rabbit encounters several actual rabbits, who tell it that it isn’t real like they are. So now we’ve got non-humans telling other non-humans that they’re not “real”, without any human interference at all.

And somehow, the takeaway from all this is that the humans are the problem?

Because in my eyes, the problem boils down to two things. 1) Circumstances outside anyone’s control, in the form of scarlet fever. 2) The non-humans being obsessed (of their own volition) over the nonsensical notion of being “real”.

The rabbits judge the toys negatively for being toys. The toys judge themselves negatively for being toys. Neither judgement has any real justification – they are utterly arbitrary conceptions.

But notably, the humans are the only ones who don’t judge the toys negatively simply for being toys. Quite the opposite, in fact. The only person in the story who grows to love and accept the toys for what they are is the little boy.

And while the rest of the humans may be “reality blind”, and unable to recognize the toys as more than mere objects, at least that leads them to be neutral and indifferent in their treatment of the toys – as opposed to the negative treatment the toys suffer at the hands of their own kind.

Good point about the toys being self-judging. But catch this quote from the story:

They stared at him, and the little Rabbit stared back. And all the time their noses twitched.

“Why don’t you get up and play with us?” one of them asked.

“I don’t feel like it,” said the Rabbit, for he didn’t want to explain that he had no clockwork.

“Ho!” said the furry rabbit. “It’s as easy as anything,” And he gave a big hop sideways and stood on his hind legs.

“I don’t believe you can!” he said.

“I can!” said the little Rabbit. “I can jump higher than anything!” He meant when the Boy threw him, but of course he didn’t want to say so.

“Can you hop on your hind legs?” asked the furry rabbit.

That was a dreadful question, for the Velveteen Rabbit had no hind legs at all! The back of him was made all in one piece, like a pincushion. He sat still in the bracken, and hoped that the other rabbits wouldn’t notice.

“I don’t want to!” he said again.

But the wild rabbits have very sharp eyes. And this one stretched out his neck and looked.

“He hasn’t got any hind legs!” he called out. “Fancy a rabbit without any hind legs!” And he began to laugh.